Author Notes:

We already saw this guy back in chapter two. Which I keep wanting to refer to as chapter one, probably because those two chapters were originally a single one and were only split into two after production on the second had already started.

Anyway, yeah. Here's this chapter's gimmick. It's not a consistent thing, but we'll definitely be seeing a fair bit of it and... Yeah, if you're not familiar with certain trends and time periods in comic books you're probably not going to get it. All the same though, we hope you have fun with it, particularly since this chapter's for the most part going to be pretty lighthearted and comedic.

Fun fact, this chapter's the only one so far where the cover was actually the first thing drawn for it. This is opposed to WaR and BP, where WaR's covers (not counting the prologue, since it doesn't have one) always come first, and BP where all of the covers except the first were done before any of the pages. And that one was even posted after a few of the pages had gone up, though that was mostly because BP was running late on its scheduled start time as it was.

Yeahhhhh, we're running into different material straight off the bat.... God, where to start?

This is NOT how the comic usually looks. Okay, first-time-viewers? I'm really terrified someone will get a look at the art style here and turn tail at the first glance until this is off the top page. It's a parody. Okay? Okay.

Specifically it's a parody of two things- one is Rob Liefeld. If you know who he is, you've probably heard the multitude of jokes about the guy over the years about how he can't draw, so lemme sum up- guy was a comic book artist (and later writer) in the mid-90s, whose style became extremely popular in a short span of time and later received a lot of backlash for it. And deservedly so, since studying up for this page and figuring out how to do this, I had to constantly "correct" myself to make the proportions and looks of the characters worse and worse. If anything, this page isn't poorly drawn ENOUGH.

At first I felt bad about making fun of Liefeld- everybody who's seen him at Cons says he's a really nice guy, which counts a lot in my book, butI did have fun joking around with this style and shifting the focus between how Fortress here sees thing and how the real world is. Plus it's more indicative to a bigger movement I'm mocking, I'm just using him as an indicator. The narration is more Frank Miller's thing.

Other major parody is kinda only there for backstory. I've had this sort of hatred/fascination with Law & Order: SVU for some time now, ever since my sisters watched it perpetually while I was in the same room trying to block it out and read my comics. The cast of the show seem almost intentionally designed to be the most unlikeable people imaginable, but the writers of the show remain oblivious to that. They abuse human rights on the show all the time. The last panel is just kinda what I keep wanting to happen every single episode.

But not a lot of material there, so this is the only time we go into it.

Ughhh.... yeah, that was a lot of history. I'm not sold on the (BLEEP) thing for the censorship of the swearing. Might change it to something else, like having it looked like it was rubbed out by a marker or something. Opinions?

Comments:

Why don't you just use the trick you used when Franklin was swearing for the censorship in this comic? Boy Fortress has an extremely messed up view of the world and is that female cop who appeared with Fortress in that page Martin linked to also in this chapter?